Romani genocide

The Romani genocide or the Romani Holocaust—also known as the Porajmos (Romani pronunciation: IPA: [pʰoɽajˈmos], meaning "the Devouring"), the Pharrajimos ("Cutting up", "Fragmentation", "Destruction"), and the Samudaripen ("Mass killing")—was the effort by Nazi Germany and its World War II allies to commit ethnic cleansing and eventually genocide against Europe's Romani people.[4]

Romani Holocaust
Part of World War II
Romani civilians in Asperg, Germany are rounded up for deportation by German authorities on 22 May 1940.
LocationNazi Germany and its occupied territories
Date1935–1945
TargetEuropean Roma
Attack type
Genocide, ethnic cleansing
DeathsAt least 130,565.
Other estimates give figures such as 220,000–500,000[1]
800,000[2]
or even as high as 1.5 million[3]:383–396
PerpetratorsNazi Germany and its allies
MotiveAntiziganism, Germanisation, Pan-Germanism

Under Adolf Hitler, a supplementary decree to the Nuremberg Laws was issued on 26 November 1935, classifying the Romani as "enemies of the race-based state", thereby placing them in the same category as the Jews. Thus, in some ways the fate of the Roma in Europe paralleled that of the Jews in the Jewish Holocaust.[1]

Historians estimate that between 220,000 and 500,000 Romani were killed by the Germans and their collaborators—25% to over 50% of the estimate of slightly fewer than 1 million Roma in Europe at the time.[1] Later research cited by Ian Hancock estimated the death toll to be at about 1.5 million out of an estimated 2 million Roma.[3]

In 1982, West Germany formally recognized that Germany had committed genocide against the Romani.[5][6] In 2011, Poland officially adopted the 2nd of August as a day of commemoration of the Romani genocide.[7]

Etymology

The term porajmos (also porrajmos or pharrajimos—literally, "devouring" or "destruction" in some dialects of the Romani language[8]) was introduced by Ian Hancock, in the early 1990s.[9] Hancock chose the term, coined by a Kalderash Rom, from a number of suggestions in an "informal conversation in 1993".[10]

The term is mostly used by activists and it is unknown to most Roma, including relatives of victims and survivors.[9] Some Russian and Balkan Romani activists protest against the use of the word porajmos.[10] In various dialects, porajmos is synonymous with poravipe which means "violation" and "rape", a term which some Roma consider offensive. János Bársony and Ágnes Daróczi, pioneering organisers of the Romani civil rights movement in Hungary, prefer the Pharrajimos, a Romani word meaning "cutting up", "fragmentation", "destruction". They argue against using porrajmos, saying it is marhime (unclean, untouchable): "[p]orrajmos is unpronounceable in the Roma community, and thus is incapable of conveying the sufferings of the Roma".[11]

Balkan Romani activists prefer the term samudaripen ("mass killing"),[12] first introduced by linguist Marcel Courthiade. Hancock dismisses this word, arguing that it does not conform to Romani language morphology.[10] Some Ruska Roma activists offer the term Kali Traš ("Black Fear").[13] Another alternative that has been used is Berša Bibahtale ("The Unhappy Years").[10] Lastly, adapted borrowings such as Holokosto, Holokausto, etc. are also occasionally used in the Romani language.

Linguistically, the term porajmos is composed of the verb root porrav- and the abstract-forming nominal ending -imos. This ending is of the Vlax Romani dialect, whereas other varieties generally use -ibe(n) or -ipe(n).[14] For the verb itself, the most commonly given meaning is "to open/stretch wide" or "to rip open", whereas the meaning "to open up the mouth, devour" occurs in fewer varieties.[15]

History

Emergence of scientific racism

In the late 19th century, the emergence of scientific racism and Social Darwinism, linking social differences with racial differences, provided the German public with pseudoscientific justifications for prejudices against Jews and Roma. During this period, "the concept of race was systematically employed in order to explain social phenomena." This approach attempted to validate the belief that races were not variations of a single species of man but had distinctly different biological origins. It established a purportedly scientifically-backed racial hierarchy, which defined certain minority groups as the other on the basis of biology.[16]

In addition to racial pseudo-science, the end of the 19th century was a period of state-sponsored modernization in Germany. Industrial development altered many aspects of society. Most notably, the period shifted social norms of work and life. For Roma, this meant a denial of their traditional way of life as craftsmen and artisans. János Bársony notes that "industrial development devalued their services as craftsmen, resulting in the disintegration of their communities and social marginalization."[17]

Persecution under the German Empire and the Weimar Republic

The developments of racial pseudo-science and modernization resulted in anti-Romani state interventions, carried out by both the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. In 1899, the Imperial Police Headquarters in Munich established the Information Services on Romani by the Security Police. Its purpose was to keep records (identification cards, fingerprints, photographs, etc.) and continuous surveillance on the Roma community. Roma in the Weimar Republic were forbidden from entering public swimming pools, parks, and other recreational areas, and depicted throughout Germany and Europe as criminals and spies.[18]

The 1926 "Law for the Fight Against Gypsies, Vagrants and the Workshy" was enforced in Bavaria, becoming the national norm by 1929. It stipulated that groups identifying as 'Gypsies' avoid all travel to the region. Those already living in the area were to "be kept under control so that there [was] no longer anything to fear from them with regard to safety in the land."[19] They were forbidden from "roam[ing] about or camp[ing] in bands," and those "unable to prove regular employment" risked being sent to forced labor for up to two years. Herbet Heuss notes that "[t]his Bavarian law became the model for other German states and even for neighbouring countries."[20] The demand for Roma to give up their nomadic ways and settle in a specific region was often the focus of anti-Romani policy both of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. Once settled, communities were concentrated and isolated in one area within a town or city.[21] This process facilitated state-run surveillance practices and 'crime prevention.'

Following the passage of the Law for the Fight Against Gypsies, Vagrants, and the Workshy, public policy increasingly targeted the Roma on the explicit basis of race. In 1927, Prussia passed a law that required all Roma to carry identity cards. Eight thousand Roma were processed this way and subjected to mandatory fingerprinting and photographing.[22] Two years later, the focus became more explicit. In 1929, the German state of Hessen proposed the "Law for the Fight Against the Gypsy Menace". The same year the Centre for the Fight Against Gypsies in Germany was opened. This body enforced restrictions on travel for undocumented Roma and "allowed for the arbitrary arrest and detention of gypsies as a means of crime prevention."[23]

Aryan racial purity
Main article: Racial policy of Nazi Germany
Romani woman with German police officer and Nazi psychologist Robert Ritter

For centuries, Romani tribes had been subject to antiziganist persecution and humiliation in Europe.[24] They were stigmatized as habitual criminals, social misfits, and vagabonds.[24] When Hitler came to national power in 1933, anti-Gypsy laws in Germany remained in effect. Under the "Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals" of November 1933, the police arrested many Gypsies with others the Nazis viewed as "asocial" — prostitutes, beggars, homeless vagrants, and alcoholics — and imprisoned them in internment camps.

After Hitler's rise to power, legislation against the Romani was increasingly based upon a rhetoric of racism. Policy originally based on the premise of "fighting crime" was redirected to "fighting a people".[20] Targeted groups were no longer determined by juridical grounds. Instead, they were victims of racialized policy.[20]

The Department of Racial Hygiene and Population Biology began to experiment on Romani to determine criteria for their racial classification.[25]

The Nazis established the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit (Rassenhygienische und Bevölkerungsbiologische Forschungsstelle, Department L3 of the Reich Department of Health) in 1936. Headed by Robert Ritter and his assistant Eva Justin, this Unit was mandated to conduct an in-depth study of the "Gypsy question (Zigeunerfrage)" and to provide data required for formulating a new Reich "Gypsy law." After extensive fieldwork in the spring of 1936, consisting of interviews and medical examinations to determine the racial classification of the Roma, the Unit decided that most Romani, whom they had concluded were not of "pure Gypsy blood," posed a danger to German racial purity and should be deported or eliminated. No decision was made regarding the remainder (about 10 percent of the total Romani population of Europe), primarily Sinti and Lalleri tribes living in Germany. Several suggestions were made. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler suggested deporting the Romani to a remote reservation, as had been done by the United States for its Native Americans, where "pure Gypsies" could continue their nomadic lifestyle unhindered. According to him:

The aim of measures taken by the State to defend the homogeneity of the German nation must be the physical separation of Gypsydom from the German nation, the prevention of miscegenation, and finally, the regulation of the way of life of pure and part-Gypsies. The necessary legal foundation can only be created through a Gypsy Law, which prevents further intermingling of blood, and which regulates all the most pressing questions which go together with the existences of Gypsies in the living space of the German nation.[26]

Himmler took special interest into the "Aryan" origins of the Gypsies and distinguished between "settled" (assimilated) and "unsettled" Gypsies.

Although the Nazi regime never produced the "Gypsy Law" desired by Himmler,[27] policies and decrees were passed which discriminated against the Gypsies.[28] Gypsies were classified as "asocial" and "criminals" by the Nazi regime.[29] From 1933 on, Gypsies were placed in concentration camps.[30] After 1937, the Nazis started to carry out racial examinations on the Gypsies living in Germany.[28] In 1938, Himmler issued an order regarding the 'Gypsy question' which explicitly mentioned "race" which stated that it was "advisable to deal with the Gypsy question on the basis of race."[28] The decree made it law to register all Gypsies (including Mischlinge - mixed race), as well as those people who "travel around in a Gypsy fashion" over the age of six.[28] Although the Nazis believed that the Gypsies were originally Aryan, over time they were said to have become mixed race and were classified as "non-Aryan" and of an "alien race".[31]

Loss of citizenship
Main article: Nuremberg Laws

The Nuremberg race laws were passed on September 15, 1935. The first Nuremberg Law, the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor", forbade marriage and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans. The second Nuremberg law, "The Reich Citizenship Law", stripped Jews of their German citizenship. On November 26, 1935, Germany expanded the Nuremberg laws to also apply to the Roma. Romani, like Jews, lost their right to vote on March 7, 1936.[27]

Persecution and genocide
Romani prisoners at Belzec labor camp, 1940
The Brown Triangle. Romani prisoners in German concentration camps such as Auschwitz were forced to wear the brown inverted triangle on their prison uniforms so they could be distinguished from other inmates.[32]

The Third Reich's government began persecuting the Romani as early as 1936 when they started to transfer the people to municipal internment camps on the outskirts of cities, a prelude to their deportation to concentration camps. A December 1937 decree on "crime prevention" provided the pretext for major roundups of Gypsies. Nine representatives of the Romani community in Germany were asked to compile lists of "pure-blooded" Romanis to be saved from deportation. However, the Germans often ignored these lists, and some individuals identified on them were still sent to concentration camps.[33] Notable internment and concentration camps include Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Marzahn (which evolved from a municipal internment camp) and Vennhausen.

Initially, the Romani were herded into so-called ghettos, including the Warsaw Ghetto (April–June 1942), where they formed a distinct class in relation to the Jews. Ghetto diarist Emmanuel Ringelblum speculated that Romani were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto because the Germans wanted:

... to toss into the Ghetto everything that is characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened, and which anyway has to be destroyed.[34]

Initially, there was disagreement within the Nazi circles about how to solve the "Gypsy Question". In late 1939 and early 1940, Hans Frank, the General Governor of occupied Poland, refused to accept the 30,000 German and Austrian Roma which were to be deported to his territory. Heinrich Himmler "lobbied to save a handful of pure-blooded Roma", whom he believed to be an ancient Aryan people for his "ethnic reservation", but was opposed by Martin Bormann, who favored deportation for all Roma.[18] The debate ended in 1942 when Himmler signed the order to begin the mass deportations of Roma to Auschwitz concentration camp. During Operation Reinhard (1941–43), an undetermined number of Roma were killed in the extermination camps, such as Treblinka.[35]

German troops round up Romani in Asperg, Germany in May 1940

The Nazi persecution of Roma was not regionally consistent. In France, between 3,000 and 6,000 Roma were deported to German concentration camps as Dachau, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald, and other camps.[18] Further east, in the Balkan states and the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads, travelled from village to village massacring the inhabitants where they lived and typically leaving few to no records of the number of Roma killed in this way. In a few cases, significant documentary evidence of mass murder was generated.[36] Timothy Snyder notes that in the Soviet Union alone there were 8,000 documented cases of Roma murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in their sweep east.[37]

In return for immunity from prosecution for war crimes, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski stated at the Einsatzgruppen Trial that "the principal task of the Einsatzgruppen of the S.D. was the annihilation of the Jews, Gypsies and Political Commissars".[38] Roma in the Slovak Republic were killed by local collaborating auxiliaries.[18] Notably, in Denmark and Greece, local populations did not participate in the hunt for Roma as they did elsewhere.[39][40] Bulgaria and Finland, although allies of Germany, did not cooperate with the Porajmos, just as they did not cooperate with the Jewish Shoah.

On 16 December 1942, Himmler ordered that the Romani candidates for extermination should be transferred from ghettos to the extermination facilities of Auschwitz-Birkenau. On 15 November 1943, Himmler ordered that Romani and "part-Romanies" were to be put "on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps".[41] The camp authorities housed Roma in a special compound that was called the "Gypsy family camp". Some 23,000 Roma, Sinti, and Lalleri were deported to Auschwitz altogether.[1] In concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Gypsies wore brown or black triangular patches, the symbol for "asocials", or green ones, the symbol for professional criminals, and less frequently the letter "Z" (meaning Zigeuner, German word for gypsy).

Sybil Milton, a scholar of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust,[42] has speculated that Hitler was involved in the decision to deport all Romani to Auschwitz, as Himmler gave the order six days after meeting with Hitler. For that meeting, Himmler had prepared a report on the subject Führer: Aufstellung wer sind Zigeuner.[43] On some occasions, the Roma attempted to resist the Nazis' extermination. In May 1944 at Auschwitz, SS guards tried to liquidate the Gypsy Family Camp and were "met with unexpected resistance". When ordered to come out, they refused, having been warned and arming themselves with crude weapons: iron pipes, shovels and other tools. The SS chose not to confront the Roma directly and withdrew for several months. After transferring as many as 3,000 Roma who were capable of forced labor to Auschwitz I and other concentration camps, the SS moved against the remaining 2,898 inmates on August 2. The SS killed nearly all of the remaining inmates, most of them ill, elderly men, women and children, in the gas chambers of Birkenau. At least 19,000 of the 23,000 Roma sent to Auschwitz died there.[18]

The Society for Threatened Peoples estimates the Romani deaths at 277,100.[44] Martin Gilbert estimates that a total of more than 220,000 of the 700,000 Romani in Europe were killed, including 15,000 (mainly from the Soviet Union) in Mauthausen in January–May 1945.[45] The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum cites scholars who estimate the number of Sinti and Roma killed as between 220,000 and 500,000.[27] Sybil Milton, a historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Research Institute, estimated the number of lives lost as "something between a half-million and a million-and-a-half".[3][46]

Persecution in other Axis countries and occupied countries

Romani were also persecuted by the puppet regimes that cooperated with the Third Reich during the war, especially the notorious Ustaše regime in occupied Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Syrmia. Tens of thousands of Romani were killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp, along with Serbs, Jews, and Anti-fascist Muslims and Croats. Yad Vashem estimates that the Porajmos was most intense in Yugoslavia, where around 90,000 Romani were killed.[39] The Ustaše government virtually annihilated the country's Romani population, killing an estimated 25,000 and also deporting around 26,000.[1][47]

In the Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia, the German occupiers and Serbian collaborationist puppet government Government of National Salvation killed thousands of Romani in the Banjica concentration camp, Crveni Krst concentration camp and Topovske Šupe concentration camp along with Jews.[48] In August 1942 Harald Turner reported to his superiors that "Serbia is the only country in which the Jewish question and the Gypsy question have been solved."[49]

Serbian Romani were parties to the unsuccessful class action suit against the Vatican Bank and others in the U.S. federal court in which they sought the return of wartime loot.[50]

The governments of some Nazi German allies, namely Slovakia, Finland, Italy, Vichy France, Hungary, and Romania, also contributed to the Nazi plan of Romani extermination, but most Romani in these countries survived, unlike those in Ustaše Croatia or areas directly ruled by Nazi Germany (such as occupied Poland). The Hungarian Arrow Cross government deported between 28,000 and 33,000 Romani out of a population that was estimated to be between 70,000 and 100,000.[51]

The Romanian government of Ion Antonescu did not systematically exterminate the approximately 300,000 Roma on its territory. Some resident Roma were deported to Romanian-run concentration camps in occupied Transnistria.[1] Of the estimated 25,000 Romani inmates of these camps, 11,000 (44%, or almost half) died.[52] (See also the research of Michelle Kelso, presented in her film, Hidden Sorrows,[53] based upon research amongst the survivors and in archives.)

According to eyewitness Mrs. de Wiek, Anne Frank, a notable Jewish Holocaust victim, is recorded as having witnessed the prelude to the murder of Romani children at Auschwitz: "I can still see her standing at the door and looking down the camp street as a herd of naked gypsy girls were driven by, to the crematory, and Anne watched them going and cried."[54]

In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Romani internees were sent to the Lety and Hodonín concentration camps before being transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau for gassing. What makes the Lety camp unique is that it was staffed by Czech guards, who could be even more brutal than the Germans, as testified in Paul Polansky's book Black Silence. The genocide was so thorough that the vast majority of Romani in the Czech Republic today are actually descended from migrants from Slovakia who moved there during the post-war years in Czechoslovakia. In Nazi-occupied France, between 16,000 and 18,000 were killed.[39]

The small Romani population in Denmark was not subjected to mass killings by the Nazi occupiers, instead, it was simply classified as "asocial". Angus Fraser attributes this to "doubts over ethnic demarcations within the travelling population".[55] The Romanis of Greece were taken hostage and prepared for deportation to Auschwitz, but they were saved by appeals from the Archbishop of Athens and the Greek Prime Minister.[56]

In 1934, 68 Romani, most of them Norwegian citizens, were denied entry into Norway, and they were also denied transit through Sweden and Denmark when they wanted to leave Germany. In the winter of 1943–1944, 66 members of the Josef, Karoli, and Modis families were interned in Belgium and deported to the gypsy department in Auschwitz. Only four members of this group survived.[57][58]

Estimated number of victims

The following figures are from The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's online encyclopedia of the Holocaust.[59][60]

Country Roma population, 1939 Number of Victims at least killed Estimate by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Albania 20,000 ? ?
Austria 11,200 6,800 8,250
Belgium 600 350 500
Bulgaria 80,000 0 0
Czech Republic (Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia) 13,000 5,000 6,500
Estonia 1,000 500 1,000
France 40,000 15,150 15,150
Germany 20,000 15,000 15,000
Greece ? 50 50
Hungary 100,000 1,000 28,000
Italy 25,000 1,000 1,000
Latvia 5,000 1,500 2,500
Lithuania 1,000 500 1,000
Luxembourg 200 100 200
Netherlands 500 215 500
Poland 50,000 8,000 35,000
Romania 300,000 19,000 36,000
Slovakia 80,000 400 10,000
Soviet Union (1939 borders) 200,000 30,000 35,000
Yugoslavia 100,000 26,000 90,000
Total 947,500 130,565 285,650

However new findings and documents uncovered by research experts revealed that the Roma death toll was at least about 200,000 to 500,000 of the 1 or 2 million Roma in Europe, although there are numerous experts and scholars who give much higher number of Romani deaths, such as Ian Hancock, director of the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin,[61] in his findings discovered that almost the entire Romani population was killed in Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.[62] Rudolph Rummel, the late professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii who spent his career assembling data on collective violence by governments toward their people (for which he coined the term democide), estimated that 258,000 must have been killed in Europe,[63] 36,000 in Romania under Ion Antonescu[64] and 27,000 in Ustaše-controlled Croatia.[65]

In a 2010 publication, Ian Hancock stated that he agrees with the view that the number of Romanies killed has been underestimated as a result of being grouped with others in Nazi records under headings such as "remainder to be liquidated", "hangers-on", and "partisans".[66] He notes recent evidence such as the previously obscure Lety concentration camp in the Czech Republic and Ackovic's revised estimates[67] of Romani killed by the Ustaše as high as 80,000–100,000. These numbers suggest that previous estimates have been grossly underrepresented.[68]

Zbigniew Brzezinski has estimated that 800,000 Romanies died as a result of Nazi actions.[2]

Medical experiments
Further information: Nazi human experimentation

Another distinctive feature of both the Porajmos and the Holocaust was the extensive use of human subjects in medical experiments.[69] The most notorious of these physicians was Josef Mengele, who worked in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His experiments included placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them, freezing them, attempting to change their eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes and various amputations and other brutal surgeries.[69] The full extent of his work will never be known because the truckload of records he sent to Otmar von Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was destroyed by von Verschuer.[70] Mengele's own journals, consisting of some 3,300 pages, are likely never to be published, and they are suspected to contain denials of the Holocaust.[71] Subjects who survived Mengele's experiments were almost always killed and dissected shortly afterwards.

He seemed particularly keen on working with Romani children. He would bring them sweets and toys, and would personally take them to the gas chamber. They would call him "Onkel Mengele".[72] Vera Alexander was a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz who looked after 50 sets of Romani twins:

I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents—I remember the mother's name was Stella—managed to get some morphine and they killed the children in order to end their suffering.[72]

Recognition and remembrance

The German government paid war reparations to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, but not to the Romani. There were "never any consultations at Nuremberg or any other international conference as to whether the Sinti and Roma were entitled like the Jews to reparations."[73] The Interior Ministry of Wuerttemberg argued that "Gypsies [were] persecuted under the Nazis not for any racial reason but because of an asocial and criminal record".[74] When on trial for his leadership of Einsatzgruppen in the USSR, Otto Ohlendorf cited the massacres of Romanis during the Thirty Years War as a historical precedent.[75]

West Germany recognised the genocide of the Roma in 1982,[76] and since then the Porajmos has been increasingly recognized as a genocide committed simultaneously with the Shoah.[77] The American historian Sybil Milton wrote several articles arguing that the Porajmos deserved recognition as part of the Holocaust.[78] In Switzerland, a committee of experts investigated the policy of the Swiss government during the Porajmos.[79]

Formal recognition and commemoration of the Roma persecution by the Nazis have been difficult in practical terms due to the lack of significant collective memory and documentation of the Porajmos among the Roma. This results from both of their tradition of oral history and illiteracy, heightened by widespread poverty and continuing discrimination that has forced some Roma out of state schools. One UNESCO report of Roma in Romania showed that only 40% of Roma children are enrolled in primary school, compared to the national average of 93%.[80] Of those enrolled, only 30% of Roma children go on to complete primary school. In a 2011 investigation of the state of the Roma in Europe today, Ben Judah, a Policy Fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, traveled to Romania.

Nico Fortuna, a sociologist and Roma activist, explained the distinction between Jewish collective memory of the Shoah and the Roma experience:

There is a difference between the Jewish and Roma deportees ... The Jews were shocked and can remember the year, date and time it happened. The Roma shrugged it off. They said, "Of course I was deported. I'm Roma; these things happen to a Roma." The Roma mentality is different from the Jewish mentality. For example, a Roma came to me and asked, "Why do you care so much about these deportations? Your family was not deported." I went, "I care as a Roma" and the guy said back, "I do not care because my family were brave, proud Roma that were not deported."
For the Jews it was total and everyone knew this—from bankers to pawnbrokers. For the Roma it was selective and not comprehensive. The Roma were only exterminated in a few parts of Europe such as Poland, the Netherlands, Germany and France. In Romania and much of the Balkans, only nomadic Roma and social outcast Roma were deported. This matters and influences the Roma mentality.[81]

Ian Hancock has also observed a reluctance among Roma to acknowledge their victimization by the Third Reich. The Roma "are traditionally not disposed to keeping alive the terrible memories from their history—nostalgia is a luxury for others".[18] The effects of the illiteracy, the lack of social institutions, and the rampant discrimination faced by Roma in Europe today have produced a people who, according to Fortuna, lack a "national consciousness ... and historical memory of the Holocaust because there is no Roma elite."[81]

Acts of commemoration
Plaque in Rome (Italy) in memory of Romani people who died in extermination camps

The first memorial commemorating victims of the Romani Holocaust was erected on 8 May 1956, in the Polish village of Szczurowa commemorating the Szczurowa massacre. Since 1996, a Gypsy Caravan Memorial has been traveling among the main remembrance sites in Poland, from Tarnów via Auschwitz, Szczurowa and Borzęcin Dolny, gathering the Romani and well-wishers in the remembrance of the Porajmos.[82] Several museums dedicate a part of their permanent exhibition to documenting that history, such as the Museum of Romani Culture in Czech Republic and the Ethnographic Museum in Tarnów in Poland. Some political organisations have tried to block the installation of Romani memorials near former concentration camps, as shown by the debate over Lety and Hodonin in the Czech Republic.

On 23 October 2007, Romanian President Traian Băsescu publicly apologized for his nation's role in the Porajmos, the first time a Romanian leader has done so. He called for the Porajmos to be taught in schools, stating that, "We must tell our children that six decades ago children like them were sent by the Romanian state to die of hunger and cold". Part of his apology was expressed in the Romani language. Băsescu awarded three Porajmos survivors with an Order for Faithful Services.[83] Before recognizing Romania's role in the Porajmos, Traian Băsescu was widely quoted after an incident on 19 May 2007, in which he insulted a journalist by calling her a "stinky gypsy". The president subsequently apologized.[84]

Monument to the Memory of the Holocaust of the Romani (Gypsies) in the site of German Nazi crimes during II WW, in the Polish village of Borzęcin

On 27 January 2011, Zoni Weisz became the first Roma guest of honour at Germany's official Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony. Dutch-born Weisz escaped death during a Nazi round-up when a policeman allowed him to escape. Nazi injustices against the Roma were recalled at the ceremony, including that directed at Sinto boxer Johann Trollmann.[85][86]

In July 2011 the Polish Parliament passed a resolution for the official recognition of 2 August as a day of commemoration of the genocide.[7]

On 5 May 2012 the world premiere of the Requiem for Auschwitz, by composer Roger Moreno Rathgeb, was performed at the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam by The Roma and Sinti Philharmoniker directed by Riccardo M Sahiti. The Philharmoniker is a pan-European orchestra of Roma and Sinto musicians generally employed by other classical orchestras; it is focused on the contribution of Roma culture to classical music. Dutch-Swiss Sinto Moreno Rathgeb wrote his requiem for all victims of Auschwitz and Nazi terror. The occasion of the premiere was coupled to a conference, Roma between Past and Future. The requiem has since been performed in Tilburg, Prague, Budapest, Frankfurt, Cracow, and Berlin.

On 24 October 2012 the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism was unveiled in Berlin.[87] Since 2010, ternYpe – International Roma Youth Network has organized a commemoration week called "Dikh he na bister" (look and don't forget) about 2 August in Kraków and Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 2014 they organised the largest Youth Commemoration Ceremony in history, attracting more than 1000 young Roma and non-Roma from 25 countries. This initiative of ternYpe Network was held under the European Parliament's High Patronage granted by President Martin Schulz.[88]

  • In the 2011 documentary film, A People Uncounted: The Untold Story of the Roma, filmmaker Aaron Yeger chronicles the rich, yet difficult history of the Roma people, from ancient times to the Romani genocide during WWII by the Nazis and then present day. Romani Holocaust survivors share their raw, authentic stories of life at the concentration camps, providing first-hand accounts of this minority group's experience that remains largely unknown to the public.
  • In 2009, Tony Gatlif, a French Romani film director, directed the film Korkoro, which portrays the Romani Taloche's escape from the Nazis, with help from a French notary, Justes, and his difficulty in trying to lead a sedentary life.[89] The film's other main character, Mademoiselle Lise Lundi, is inspired by Yvette Lundy, a teacher who worked in Gionges, La Marne and was active in the French Resistance.[90]
  • The 1988 Polish film, And the Violins Stopped Playing, also has Porajmos as its subject. It was criticized for showing the killing of Roma as a method of removing witnesses to the killing of Jews.[91]
  • A scene in the French-language film Train de Vie (Train of Life), directed by Radu Mihaileanu, depicts a group of Romani singing and dancing with Jews at a stop en route to a concentration camp.
  • In X-Men's graphic novel The Magneto Testament, Max Eisenhardt, who would later become Magneto, has a crush on a Romani girl called Magda. He later meets her again in Auschwitz, where she is in the Gypsy Camp and together, they plan their escape. The Porajmos is described in detail.[92]

See also

References

Notes

  1. "Holocaust Encyclopedia – Genocide of European Roma (Gypsies), 1939–1945". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Retrieved 9 August 2011.
  2. Brzezinski, Zbigniew (2010). Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century. Simon & Schuster (Touchstone). p. 10. ISBN 978-1-4391-4380-3.
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Bibliography

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Further reading

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